Mark Naison: The punitive, stress-filled environment that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Hop has created is good for no one’s children. But it is especially damaging to children who come to school hungry and fearful because their families are living on the edge.

Leonard Isenberg: What LAUSD says in terms of parent, teacher, and student input is belied by the reality of the clear legal language that again and again say the principal and superintendent maintain absolute control.

Steve Ybarra: Everyone questions why little Johnny and Joanie can’t read. Some say the problem is with the teachers. No one wants to talk about where the problem really resides — and that is with the school district system.

Lenny Isenberg: LAUSD may target you for removal, because you either refuse to go along with the longstanding and highly profitable financial scam they have been running for generations now called public education, aka minority daycare.

Rodolfo F. Acuña: My mother always knew that Mexicans had to be better than gringos if they were going to make it. We had to be cleaner; she would scrub my elbows until they were raw, trying to make them white. She bought us an Encyclopedia Britannica that none of us could read.

Leonard Isenberg: Since LAUSD is only paid for physical presence of students at school, the mass exodus of students from LAUSD schools would have a profound effect on LAUSD’s ability to finance its failed and unaccountable public education policies.

Election Day Propositions, Candidates, Judges and More for the November 2, 2010 election with endorsements from the Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Democratic Party. Everything you need in one place.

Shamus Cooke: If the teachers’ unions combined with other public sector unions, parent associations, and the community at large to demand fully funded public education by taxing the rich, the billionaires would find themselves without allies. Their money might then be put towards something useful.

Steve Hochstadt: When conservative Republicans controlled Washington under George Bush, they spent government money on their pet projects with little regard for the long-term budgetary consequences. Now Republicans at the national level have made the deficit one of their major points of attack against the Democrats in preparation for the November elections.

Carl Bloice: Why is it that the richest, most powerful nation on the planet, one that produces more and more billionaires each year and can spend one million dollars each on the soldiers it sends off to war, can’t afford to educate its kids? It remains a mystery to me that an administration that can spend millions of dollars to bribe states into facilitating its quite controversial school “reform” programs can’t come up with the resources to stave off the pending mass layoffs of teachers.

Carl Bloice–September is four months away and one thing is certain: the public is not be adequately alerted to the seriousness of the situation and mobilized to do anything about it. We would know far less about how critical things are in the schools had not students in California – where thing are really rough – set off nationwide protests about the cutbacks. And, as soon as that happened, on cue, voices popped up to declare that the protesters were deficient because they had no real analysis of the cause of the crisis and offered no solutions. The obvious response was: so what? Isn’t it the job of professionals in politics and government to provide those things?

Robert Reich: Any day now, the Obama administration will announce $4.35 billion in extra federal funds for under-performing public schools. That’s fine, but relative to the financial squeeze all the nation’s public schools now face it’s a cruel joke.